tegwick
b590e7fd59
Eight profiles on a common schema, each marking what was checked against a source this session and what is background recollection. Three are marked unverified in full — Machinations, the play substrates, most of RBG — and say so rather than reading as evaluations. Written straight after three review rounds whose entire yield was claims outrunning what had been checked, so the confidence rule is the first thing in the README. The survey changed the plan, which is what a survey is for. Track C was described in Positioning as open ground. It is not: Browne published 57 criteria for game quality, and Ai Ai already computes designer-facing measures — drama, lead changes, branching factor, completion, duration — from played games. The track becomes adopt, credit and find the gap. The gap looks real: those measures presume a leader, and SHARED GROUND has none — Modes.csv gives its tiebreak as "Not applicable". Track B probably adopts rather than builds. OpenSpiel implements CFR, best-response and exploitability over games that are simultaneous-move, imperfect-information and co-operative, which is all four of GROUND's awkward properties. "Does ATTACK ever pay" is a best-response question, and we spent three review rounds refining a two-policy sweep for it. The first Track B task is now one question — is exploitability meaningful for a co-operative game with a shared threshold — not a build. The cost of not surveying earlier is therefore measurable, and is recorded rather than glossed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Machinations
unverified throughout — background knowledge, not checked this session
What it optimises for
Game economies and feedback loops, expressed diagrammatically: resources, pools, converters, and the flows between them, simulated immediately as you edit.
How a game is defined
A diagram of resource flows — not a rules-complete description. You model the economy, not the game.
What it can analyse
Emergent economic behaviour: runaway loops, starvation, equilibrium of resource flows. Fast iteration is the selling point.
What it does not do
Model a played game: no turn structure, hidden information, or simultaneous decisions in the sense GROUND needs. It is a model of a subsystem.
Relevance to clay-borg
Limited, and worth stating so. GROUND's interesting structure is social state and commit/reveal, not resource economy. The one place it touches us is the Stress ledger, which is a flow — and the H1 finding that "ATTACK is the sole inbound pressure" is exactly the observation a flow diagram makes obvious at a glance.
That is a real lesson: it took us a policy panel and three review rounds to notice a property of the Stress economy that a flow model would have shown immediately.
What to steal
The habit of asking, for any resource: what puts it in, what takes it out, and is either path reachable?
Open questions
- Everything factual above. This profile is a placeholder with a lesson attached, not an evaluation.
Sources
None fetched. Marked unverified in full rather than dressed up.